


Just one night

by More11a



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bucky copes but still needs a hug, Buddies, CW spoilers!, Everyone Needs A Hug, Fluffy relief, Gen, I have no idea how to tag, Melancholy, Steve tries to cope, T'Challa is an angel, That's why Marvel is so damn relevant, everyone is a mess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-04
Updated: 2016-10-04
Packaged: 2018-08-19 14:06:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8211232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/More11a/pseuds/More11a
Summary: After the events of Civil War, Steve and Bucky have one night together. [CW spoilers!]





	

**Author's Note:**

> "I will stay with you until tomorrow comes." (Necessary Response)
> 
>  
> 
> Can be read with slashy undertones if you prefer, but I, for my part, can’t deny that Stucky are forever my BroTP. 'Til the end of the line, oh god.

Now that the lights are low and the ceiling fan is quietly stirring the air in the room, the fight seems like a distant memory already, if it wasn’t for the ache in Steve’s bones and the soft king-size bed that’s way too inviting under his ass. The bruises have already started to fade, thanks to the serum, but he’s still too damn tired and sore to notice. Steve isn’t sure he wants to sleep at all tonight, though. He would prefer to sit out on the balcony of the luxurious suite that T’Challa, being the better man that he is, provided them with, and to have a drink and look out over the Nigerian jungle with its strange life forms and nightly array of sounds until the sun comes up.

Then again, Bucky probably shouldn’t have a drink because he’s on painkillers. The metal arm wasn’t designed to feel pain, but after all, Tony’s blast damaged the wires connecting it to the actual nerve and muscle in Bucky’s shoulder. On the other hand, Steve himself shouldn’t have a drink because he tends to say the stupidest things when he drinks, even in the roughly thirty seconds it takes his enhanced body to burn through the alcohol and leave him stone cold sober. Thirty seconds can be a very long time if you’ve got stupid things to say. Steve is pulled out of his thoughts by Bucky, who steps out of the bathroom and stumbles slightly into a doorframe that’s made of some dark expensive wood. He’s a little off-balance now that the weight of the arm is gone, but the skin around his eyes crinkles in that way that Steve knows so very well, and he realizes Bucky’s actually _laughing it off_. 

Steve is not okay. He’s considerably far from okay, what with being a war veteran unexpectedly propelled seventy years into the future and all that, but he's found something that helps. For the past years, searching for Bucky was that thing, and now that he’s here, it’s strangely anticlimactic. Steve was ready to feel his own heart break when he walked into that apartment in Vienna, but between the fighting and the whirlwind of friends-turned-enemies, he’s hardly had time to think. 

He’s opened the door to the balcony to let in some air, but what comes in is mostly damp heat. Bucky likes it. It’s the farthest thing imaginable from Siberia. Actually, the cold of the cryo tank is the only thing that’s still nagging at the back of his mind, the only thing that might deter him if he wasn’t so utterly sure that going back under is the right thing to do, and is the right thing for him. He can’t remember if he’s ever done that before in his life, doing something responsible and doing something for himself and having the two things coincide. He looks at Steve and it hurts to know that he won’t see him for a long time. Bucky will be frozen again, and it might be very long until he wakes up, maybe another seventy years, maybe never. Steve might be gone by then, everyone gone. But at least they will be safe. Everyone will be safe as long as he is under lock and key, and the thought makes Bucky dizzy with relief. It will be like death without the commitment, like sleeping without the nightmares, and Bucky is half-aware that’s quite pathetic, but can’t really help it. He’s always been like that, but his dreams used to be very different. 

He won’t have to challenge every thought that runs through his head, poke and prod it to see where it’s coming from, he won’t have to mistrust his own mind, always looking for a catch, always fighting these intrusive thoughts he’s developed – whether it’s an effect of being shocked into oblivion too many times or something else, he doesn’t know – and that make it even harder for him to distinguish reality from the waking hell he takes it for. Took it for, before making up with T'Challa, with Natasha, before his banter with Sam ... before Steve. 

He loves this, loves being with Steve, even with the rest of the team. He’s still unsure if they like him, and pretty sure they can’t bring themselves to trust him farther than they can throw, but it’s okay, because he knows he would trust them if it came to that. 

An exotic bird cries outside, quite close, and they both simultaneously turn their eyes towards the door, as if they’re expecting to see something big spread its wings and take flight. God knows why T’Challa even keeps a secret high-security base that could double as a luxury resort. It’s probably the suite for some important diplomatic guest to His Highness that the two of them are occupying right now, in a place that looks like it’s taken out of freaking Discovery Channel. “I bet they’ve got mosquitoes big as your head”, says Bucky and sounds, for some reason, strangely like a boy on an adventure. It would be wrong to say that Bucky’s mood throws Steve off, but he’s not a hundred per cent comfortable with it. He’s also idiotically happy at the same time. Put short, the big Captain America’s head is a proper mess right now, and the reason for it is making his way over to the bed, still staggering a little, but with his bare feet silent on the luxurious carpet, and Steve is sure that he’ll have his fighter grace back in no time. 

Bucky settles next to him with a sigh that sounds so very much like it used to over seventy years ago. All this time, all the different reunion scenes that Steve imagined in his head over and over again – of Bucky being too traumatized to speak, of Bucky trying to kill him again, of Steve having to pick up the pieces – just seem to vanish, and the scenery is, for all the craziness that preceded it, so _normal_ that Steve kind of can’t deal. He’s waiting for the catch, for it all to crumble away like a dream. 

He tries to catch a glimpse of Bucky’s expression. The wild eyes, the mouth set in a determined line, the stony killing machine face, the Asset face, the Winter Soldier face, it’s all gone right now. Of course, he looks like a man who’s been through a lot, but then, they all look like men (and women) who could use a rest at the end of this day. Steve doesn’t know if Bucky’s alright. He’s very, very probably not alright at all, because it still takes just a simple string of seemingly random words to flick the switch in his head – _longing, rusted, furnace_ , Steve thinks and shudders – but he seems almost content now, calm and collected and more relaxed than he has seen him between 1945 and now. 

He remembers when Bucky was all tousled hair and lazy smiles, just a kid from Brooklyn out to win the ladies’ hearts and defend his country. It seems like centuries ago, not just decades – but with the way the world has changed, this incredibly fast change that they call progress, it’s hard to fathom that their lives might be in the history books if they’re still here and so alive. Steve thinks of Peggy then and what she would’ve said if she could see them now. 

hey are so much more than the boys they were, and still, even back then there was so much more to them than everyone liked to see. Every time Steve tries to tell someone what it was like in the past, casually tries to paint a picture (he’s never been good at doing that with words, but you can’t answer a conversation in drawings), he can see they’re getting it wrong.  
Likewise, they’re getting _Bucky_ wrong. If only he could make them see what a brilliant, loyal, hard-working go-getter Bucky was, mouth always running, always getting them into trouble, trouble that he punched their way out of for Steve, always mostly for Steve. 

He wants to touch Bucky, to make sure that he’s real, but he doesn’t know how. It’s always been Bucky who ruffled his hair in a drafty back alley, back when Steve’s head was at a convenient height for him to reach. It’s always been Bucky who clapped his Captain on the shoulder, back when they were off with the Commandos. It’s always been Bucky who’s been doing the touching, who’s always been about doing stuff with his hands. 

Right now, Bucky thinks, it feels good to have one hand. There has been blood on it, countless times, in the cracks on his knuckles and under his nails, but at least it’s _his_. He knows that right now, he is Bucky and this hand is Bucky’s hand that won’t develop a life of its own, and it won’t hurt him or anyone else against his will. It’s a rather large hand with considerable strength, but it’s no weapon. 

Steve’s no weapon either. At his core, he’s still not a super soldier, maybe no soldier at all. But he’s no mascot and no idiot. > If only Bucky could make them see that Steve has always been so much more than a sickly loser with a tendency to hide in notebooks and newspapers and dreams of glory. Bucky knows it’s still hard for most to see Steve as who he really is now. They think Captain America is just a humorless, old-fashioned, thick soldier, a hollow show act for cheering on the masses, but Bucky has seen his fair share of thick soldiers, green city boys so full of patriotism they couldn’t imagine anything better than shooting guns at the declared enemy and dream of being a hero, and maybe he was one of them. Not with as much fervor as Steve though. Sometimes he thinks that Steve only used to be so keen on becoming a soldier because he felt, at that time, it would never happen. It is an unfair thought, because Steve threw himself into it when he finally could and saved Bucky’s life. Steve is still different. He’s _honorable_ , which might probably get him killed one day because modern people have shit for honor. 

He’s never actually fought alongside Steve before, not in near combat anyway, and he’s still surprised how natural it felt. Not choreographed at all, and probably not pretty – then again, when are fights anything like that – but quick and dirty and very much like clockwork, and maybe they still are what makes each other tick, in more ways than one. It hardly matters which year it is, he thinks. What matters is that they are both here, in the same place at the same time, something he never really allowed himself to hope for. 

Steve’s still sitting on the edge of the bed, so Bucky catches himself on Steve's shoulder with the right hand as he stands up, his movements still a bit unsteady. “Not very smooth, Barnes”, says Steve jokingly, and Bucky lifts an eyebrow and calls him a punk, and Steve finally feels he could burst into a million pieces, and his heart is doing the thing he’s been waiting for, beating wildly in his chest. 

“I don’t wanna go to sleep”, says Bucky so quietly that Steve has to strain to hear. “I’ll be resting for so long.” He smiles at Steve then, the tiniest of smiles, and it’s so strange that Steve wants to scream, but at the same time so familiar that he has to turn his head because he can’t keep his facial expression in check. 

Bucky parts the mosquito net and shrugs his right shoulder towards the balcony. “Ready to let some bugs bite you?” Steve grins and leaves his spot on the mattress to follow Bucky out into the night. 

There are foreign stars in the sky and unspoken memories in the air. They won’t sleep, and they’ll think about tomorrow in the morning. 


End file.
